about the art

This month we’re examining the experience of individuals within algorithm-dominated, corporate systems with a film by Forbes Graham and mail art by Felix Quintana.

During a 15-month job search, sound artist and filmmaker Forbes Graham submitted hundreds of applications for a data analyst position—all of which he knew would be scanned by a computer before they ever reached the eyes of a person. His film Cover Letters transforms this experience into a frenetic visual tapestry, where text from his applications forms a hallucinogenic, corporate Rorschach test. His improvised electronic score mirrors the persistence of his search—relentless melodies cutting through noise in a musical metaphor for trying to stand out in an impersonal, algorithm-driven hiring process.

Felix Quintana’s mail art, Community Crossing the Street by Langer's Square, MacArthur Park, is a cyanotype print using imagery from Google Street View, which photographs streets and neighborhoods through car-mounted cameras—only to erase faces for privacy. Felix reframes this erasure as a symbol of the disappearing histories of families and businesses in Southeast, Central, and East Los Angeles communities. Deeply personal to him, his work uplifts the beauty of day-to-day routines and emblems of diasporic communities of Los Angeles, centering their enduring stories of migration and resilience.

for a deeper dive

Visual Artist, Felix Quintana created a multi-site ephemeral portrait of Los Angeles titled fantasma paraiso / phantom paradise. This month’s postcard is one of the prints from this larger collection of the multisite exhibition where Felix placed his portrait and landscape photography directly in the locations that they represent.

The billboards, wheatpaste posters, vinyl banners, and signs uplift the beauty of the day-to-day routines and the emblems of diasporic communities of Los Angeles. The web portfolio link above allows us to see more of the individual pieces as well as understand the scale of this vast project.

Forbes Graham is a Boston-based multidisciplinary artist. We first learned about him as a composer and improvisor and his work as a visual artist is legible in his music in that it can create patterns and tapestry-like textures. In this way, he integrates all of artistic disciplines into his various works. His music recording library covers multiple genres as he is fluent in several styles Listen here to his bandcamp catalogue.

Meet the Artists